A Long Winter of Oblivion: On the Forgotten Genius of Irish Literature

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James Joyce discarded Catholicism, but he religiously observed Groundhog Day. February 2 was his birthday, and Joyce took his birthday seriously throughout his adult life. He didn’t look for the groundhog’s shadow, however. He looked for his own, and believed he’d found it in the person of another, lesser-known Irish writer who he came to consider his spiritual twin. Joyce claimed the other man had also been born on Groundhog Day in Dublin in 1882, just like him, though scholars have been unable to verify the exact birthdate of this other, lesser-known scribe. Little of the other man’s biography is in fact known with certainty.

The man may have been two years old when his father died and possibly six when he entered a Dublin orphanage, never to return home. It’s all a bit unclear; a fog of rumor hangs over his origins as it does over John Henry or Jesus Christ. This much is known: he was very small as a child; when he grew up he was still so short that one journalist said he was no taller standing than sitting; others called him a leprechaun, and he didn’t much like that; he told a cartoonist, “Eh, you want to caricature me, eh? Well, the Almighty beat you to it.” This too is known: notwithstanding his diminutive beginnings, great men would come to worship at his feet.

The Irish playwright Seán O’Casey called him “the jesting poet with a radiant star in his coxcomb.” Eugene O’Neill asked him to name his children and so Oona and Shane O’Neill got their names. James Joyce asked him to complete Finnegans Wake should Joyce himself go blind. He published plays, novels, stories, and poems, including a series of them in The New Yorker in 1929, and his voice once pervaded the Irish airwaves like rainbows south of Skibbereen. This so-called leprechaun with a voice “nimble as a goat’s foot,” as one commentator puts it, was called James Stephens.

Some evidence suggests Stephens was born not on February 2, 1882 like Joyce, but rather on February 9, 1880. Perhaps Joyce asserted they were twins because he regarded Stephens as a particularly worthy rival, and because Joyce conquered his rivals by appropriating them — and because, after being enemies, they became good friends. In a letter dated May 31, 1927, Joyce reports that for years he carried three portraits in his pocket: one of his father, one of himself, and one of James Stephens. When Ulysses was published on February 2, 1922 — on Joyce’s 40th birthday, by his own design — he inscribed a copy to his poetical twin. Stephens in turn wrote a theosophical poem called “Sarasvati” for Joyce’s birthday and for the rest of Joyce’s life gave him the kind of respect that Joyce demanded of every animal, mineral, and vegetable. Stephens called Joyce a king, encouraged him to carry on with Finnegans Wake, and when it was published, told Joyce that its last chapter was the “greatest prose ever written by a man” — praise that deeply moved Joyce, and with which he surely concurred.

But the two men didn’t like each other at first, and one senses that their rivalry forever chafed at Stephens, beginning with their first meeting in 1912, when Joyce feared and envied Stephens. In 1907, Joyce had published a small volume of poetry called Chamber Music that garnered its author little attention; Stephens’s poetry meanwhile had so impressed the famous Irish poet AE (a.k.a., George Russell) that in 1907 Russell adopted Stephens as his protégé. Stephens had by 1912 furthermore upstaged Joyce in prose. When the two first met on Dawson Street in Dublin, Stephens’s second novel The Crock of Gold was already at the printer, while Joyce was still struggling to publish his first prose work, Dubliners. According to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, Joyce dumped his publishing frustrations on Stephens, the writer whom Joyce described to his brother as “my rival, the latest Irish genius.” Stephens had of course faced trials and difficulties himself, but Joyce neither knew nor cared. Stephens says that Joyce gazed down at him in Pat Kinsella’s pub with blues eyes so magnified by his spectacles as to be “nearly as big as the eyes of a cow” before commencing a verbal assault. Stephens narrated the meeting thus on the radio in 1946:

He turned his chin and his specs at me, and away down at me, and confided the secret to me that he had read my two books; that, grammatically, I did not know the difference between a semi-colon and a colon: that my knowledge of Irish life was non-Catholic and, so, non-existent, and that I should give up writing and take to a good job like shoe-shining as a more promising profession.

I confided back to him that I had never read a word of his, and that, if Heaven preserved me to my protective wits, I never would read a word of his, unless I was asked to destructively review it.

Stephens had had the upper hand in 1912, but by 1946 Joyce had thoroughly overshadowed his old rival. The word “non-existent” in the foregoing passage calls out the name of another of Stephens’s wounds, a possible turning point in the Stephens-Joyce rivalry. It was in a 1915 essay in The New Age entitled “The Non-Existence of Ireland” that Joyce’s influential champion Ezra Pound dismissed Stephens as “a mild enough writer.” It enraged Stephens, who wrote a bitterly funny letter to The New Age deriding Pound in doggerel form. Stephens concludes that having written Pound’s name, he had to go “fumigate” his sullied pen.

Such injuries were perhaps fresh in Stephens’s mind when, in a 1917 letter, he conceded to his American publisher that Joyce was “a clever, competent writer, but…by no means a great writer.” Stephens went on in that letter to slag Joyce as “a disappointed, envious man” and Joyce’s work as “unpleasant” and “thin.”

In later years, after Stephens and Joyce had become close friends, and after Stephens had affably accommodated himself to Joyce’s international fame, he repented of those criticisms and praised Joyce at every opportunity. And the two friends celebrated their shared birthday together. On February 2, 1933, Stephens wrote from Paris to thank his children Iris and Seumas for their birthday wishes. His letter calls February 2 “that most noble of dates.” “Tis Candlemas,” he writes, “and it is also the end of most things, and the beginning of everything…[W]ill go thence at 8.30 to the Joyces where a party of some kind is to be held to celebrate our mutual birthday…It was bitterly cold here until three days ago, and I had a cold — your mother has it now, but I didn’t need it anyway.”

Stephens was famous for his wit, and Richard Ellmann and others have observed that his humor depended on his modesty and self-deprecation. Being under five feet tall, he identified with the little guy. An editor of Stephens’s letters, Richard Finneran, asserts that Stephens celebrated his birthday on February 2 long before his acquaintance with Joyce; if so, perhaps that’s because, as Ellmann speculates, “Stephens was invariably sympathetic to the intrusions of small creatures into the universe.” Those sympathies are plainly evident in Stephens poems like 1924’s “Little Things” in which Stephens writes, “Little things that run and quail, / And die in silence and despair. / Little things that fight and fail, / And fall on earth and sea and air.”

Ellmann notes that unlike Joyce, Stephens “often chose to appear as elfin.” He was unlike Joyce in his temerity before the possibility of oblivion. David McCord wrote in 1962 of Stephens: “the man put his books out the way one would plant a tree, each to grow to its own size, each to gather in its shade those who have traveled a long way through the mire, the dust and the anxiety of the world.” There is something sagacious and honorable in Stephens’s retiring attitude to posterity, but one sad outcome may be that “the readers of Joyce — a big lot of them too — have overlooked a fellow genius,” as McCord says. Stephens is for one thing much funnier than Joyce, McCord contends, and it’s impossible to disagree with him. “The surrealist in Stephens is always spacious,” McCord goes on, “his hells and heavens (for me at least) have both an altitude and depth that I do not find even in Finnegans Wake.”

Could it be that the shabby, out-of-print volumes that keep custody of Stephens’s legacy are, as McCord argues, “vintage wine in a rain barrel?” Could it be that underneath a homely title like Irish Fairy Tales, which Padraic Colum notes was “never sufficiently praised” and which is now mislabelled as children’s literature, there lies a work of true genius?

Having read Irish Fairy Tales, I add my voice to those who sing in praise of the long-lost leprechaun of Irish literature. For Irish Fairy Tales is more than good. It’s a work of genius on the Joyce and W.B. Yeats level, though stylistically different in almost every way from that of his taller and more famous peers. Stephens writes in that work:

I became the king of the salmon, and, with my multitudes, I ranged on the tides of the world. Green and purple distances were under me: green and gold the sunlit regions above. In these latitudes I moved through a world of amber, myself amber and gold; in those others, in a sparkle of lucent blue, I curved, lit like a living jewel: and in these again, through dusks of ebony all mazed with silver, I shot and shone, the wonder of the sea.

No wonder no one ever wrote Stephens a fitting epitaph; no one could say it quite as well as him! But perhaps what Stephens wrote of the king of the salmon is good enough for himself. He is brave, skilled, honorable, and as unconcerned with either fame or revenge as his hero Fionn.

In “The Boyhood of Fionn,” a piece of magical realism in Irish Fairy Tales to stand aside Gabriel García Márquez and Franz Kafka, Fionn encounters a wise poet sitting on the bank of a wild, remote river. He asks the poet, “Why do you live on the bank of a river?” The poet answers:

‘Because a poem is a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water that poetry is revealed to the mind.’
‘How long have you been here?’ was the next query.
‘Seven years’ the poet answered.
‘It is a long time,’ said wondering Fionn.
‘I would wait twice as long for a poem,’ said the inveterate bard.

Retiring into Joyce’s shadow, Stephens remarked that Finnegans Wake is both “unreadable” and “wonderful.” His own works are readable and wonderful. Groundhog Day seems a fitting time for Stephens to step back out into the light after a long winter of oblivion in Joyce’s shadow. Or, if that’s not to be just now, later then. However long it takes. Stephens would wait twice as long for a poem.

Clothes aren’t just something one puts on a character to stop her from being naked. Done right, clothes are everything -- a way of describing class, affluence, taste, self-presentation, mental health, body image.

Genre, genre, genre, whole days go by when I am asked of nothing else, especially those moronic questions about horror that should have been swept out of civilized discourse at least thirty years ago: Tell us now, if you can, for we are really terribly curious about this, why is it, do you think, that reasonable people should pay good money to be, well, frightened? What, you know, can the appeal of such… unpleasantness… actually be? And on a more personal note, please, we’re all so curious… if you wouldn’t mind… what scares you? Okay, in reverse order, then: pretty much the same kind of thing that frightens you, what did you think I’d say, giant lizards? And, moving on to the first question: What are you trying to suggest, that you are not, have never been, implicated in this particular transaction? How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call “unpleasantness” is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience? Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.
Let’s be honest, down there in the gutter is where most of us live better than half the time anyhow, probably a lot more than half. And if we are talking about those states of consciousness kept on back-burner low-simmer, we have to jack the figure up to maybe ninety per cent of the time, maybe ninety-eight. At this point, some impolite character like me comes along and says, It’s too bad you find this stuff so unacceptable when it takes up so much of your life, hmmm, couldn’t you maybe revise your category stances and define all this prime-time, tight-focus actuality in a different way? Because let’s face it, you don’t spend your life hang-gliding from one emotional peak to another, do you. The only way you recognize an emotional peak when you are fortunate enough to experience one is that it feels so different from the rest of your life, hmmm, let’s make that little noise again, hmmm, it’s so expressive of almost unwilling mentation. Why, we could say, it’s almost as though we were designed to be struggling and limping our way through the lowlands and gutterscapes, it’s like, you know, that’s the point, the struggling and limping, the gutterscapes so foul so fragrant. The point. The more you take in, the more you see. Shame shock blood pain grief suffering… you might even say, that’s the good part.
Oh, not really. Please. If that weren’t so perverse, it’d just be silly.
Um. Well, yes, perverse, I agree, but not at all silly. Yes, really: the good part. Meaning, the room where you and your life sit opposite each other in the dark, blinking and squinting, hoping the grimace on the blood-smeared face across the room is a brave grin. Or “plucky,” if that’s the way you think.
Well now, come on, that’s completely ridiculous. That’s just… genre, is what that is. And you accuse us of thinking in clichés!
Okay: genre genre genre, here we go. Crime novels and horror stories huddle down here in the gutter, right?, while real literature lives in the fragrant uplands and on the radiant peaks where plotting is at most secondary and life proceeds by instinct and intelligence, by fine intuition and a lively moral consciousness, owing nothing to formulae and the requirement to gratify the lazy reader’s expectations of suspenseful suspense and exciting excitement. One is disposable, the other immortal. However… well, just for beginners, let’s admit that literary fiction is a genre, too, shall we? Expectations guide its readers, that of respect for consensus reality and the poignancy of seemingly ordinary lives, of sensitive character-drawing and vivid scene-painting, of the reversals and conflicts characteristic of the several sub-genres of literary fiction: the academic novel, the comic novel, the adultery novel, the comic academic adultery-novel, the experimental novel, the novel of foreign travel or inward journey, of unexpected encounter, of breakdown, of alcoholism, of youth, of middle age, of a hundred different things so well-known and encoded that the fonts used for the titles and the authors’ names tell you as much as the flap copy.
You know what else those fonts can tell you? This isn’t an exact science, let me admit, but they suggest how many copies the publisher thinks he is going to sell. It’s all there, right on the jacket: this book is a challenging yet comforting work of fiction in which the sensitive and ironic young protagonist experiences painful yet comic difficulties writing his first novel in a French fishing village. Soon, pages of his manuscript disappear from his desk and begin to turn up in the locations they describe. We hope to unload at least ten thousand copies of this well-written, pallid piece of post-modern, post-Jamesian crapola, but five is about what we expect. Title and author’s name “charming” in crumbling white letters, sans serif, all lower case, title just below jacket center and to the left, author’s name two lines down, tabbed farther left and irregularly spaced, some letters slightly askew. That says: five is about what we expect. The author will soon find that he no longer has a two-book contract.
Which is to note that publishing companies tend to signal complex decisions about marketing in ways both deliberate and inadvertent. Bookstores organize their inventory by sorting them into categories, and publishers try to make it easy for them. Genre jackets feature bright colors and embossed lettering, the author’s name in immense fonts bannered across the jacket bottom underneath some thematic kabuki. That’s how you know they are crime novels, all that vulgar hoopla on the jacket, even the “good taste” crime jackets look crass and shiny. In bookstores, you spot them right away, and that’s the point. Genre fiction came into being because publishers discovered from the pulps that there was a market for it, and it stays viable because it’s like food, people keep buying books by Robert B. Parker and Michael Connolly to get the same delightful taste in their mouths over and over, as if the books were made of maple walnut ice cream. (I’d say that people bought three decades' worth of John Updike and Philip Roth novels for the same reason, and that a completely different set of readers have kept returning to William Gaddis and Thomas Bernhardt for an earned anticipated nourishment that cannot really be compared to ice cream.)
Now, as fantastically reliable as he was in delivering the desired goods, Robert B. Parker grew awfully soft in his later years, but Michael Connelly has remained true to his original impulses, to put on display the underbelly of L.A. while tracking an idiosyncratic detective’s solution of a complex crime or series of crimes. While remaining a very reliable and pleasurable crime writer, however, Connelly never rises above that category. Because Connolly is both wholly serious and honest about what he does, he would find the idea of “rising above his “category” risible. He should, anyhow—he’s earned that much, the right to an absolute respect for his own work. It is worth noting that both Parker and Connelly are rooted in Raymond Chandler, who may be the only American crime writer ever really to turn genre crime fiction into art, and he managed to do it only once, in The Long Goodbye. He knew he’d done it, too: you can feel it in his letters, the evolution from an earlier edgy, wary defensiveness into, late in his life, a self-doubting, self-questioning master’s sense of accomplishment. Though Ross Macdonald came very close a couple of times, none of the writers who followed along after Chandler ever wrote anything as resonant, complex and sad as The Long Goodbye. None of them, not even Macdonald, ever could, in large part because they were all using a borrowed template that grew thinner and thinner with every generation.
Macdonald, Parker and Connelly worked or work in a genre that provides convenient situation-patterns, a condition that is made possible because the designations “crime” and “mystery” identify and to some extent predetermine the content of the fiction they cover. Crime writers and academics of genre fiction like to denigrate horror by pointing out that unlike “mystery,” “western” or “romance,” “horror” specifies no content beyond the emotion it is intended to arouse. I think this absence of specificity is not at all a limitation but the reverse, a great enhancement. That no situational templates are built into horror grants it an inherent boundarilessness, a boundlessness, an inexhaustible unlimitedness. If the “horror” part is not stressed all that overtly and the author spares us zombies, vampires, ghosts, haunted houses, hideous things in bandages, etc., what results is fiction indistinguishable, except in one element alone, from literary fiction. That crucial element could be called point of view, or angle of vision. It is whatever dictates the way in which everything is seen. For further details, return to my first paragraph. Consult your heart, go on, lock yourself in and think about loss and loneliness, about grief, these hard, necessary facts. Where do you live, really, in what kind of world? The question can never be answered in a way that is not unsettling.
[Image credit: Windell Oskay]

5 comments:

Stephens is probably most read today for his The Insurrection in Dublin, his eye witness account of the Easter Rising. It is not a political book – it is a well observed, fascinating account. It should be read by anyone interested in either Stephens or the Rising.

(Fearghal McGarry’s The Rising, based on archived accounts of particpants on both sides as well as civilians would be a great companion piece. It is masterly history.)

There is something incredibly moving and exciting about reclaiming a lost piece of history, reviving a lost voice. This piece serves as a resurrection, and as reassurance to artists that their work and their words can have meaning and effect beyond their own time.

Splendid article– what a picture you’ve made of this man and his work. Gorgeous quotes! Only know Stephens from the beautiful folk-y albums Bill Crofut made with poems by Stephens and others, including Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, Reid (and even Joyce). So forgive this digression– if it is indeed a digression–but I’d like to make a case for less of a distinction between what constitutes children’s literature and well, literature. I’m going on instinct here, but maybe this habit that has a lot to do with why work like Irish Fairy Tales gets overlooked. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Crofut albums are children’s records that I found when my kids were babies. But they mean as much to me now as they did then, and I’m as likely to listen to them side by side with “grown up” music, just as I might pick up Travers or Sendak after reading Rankine or Chaucer.

In the second episode of the first season of True Detective, entitled “Seeing Things,” the characters Rust Cohle and Marty Hart are investigating the murder of Dora Lange in the year 1995. Their investigation leads them to a burnt-out, crumbling church in the middle of a desolate Louisiana swampland. Upon exiting the car, Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) looks to his side and sees a flock of birds rise from the ground. The birds soon begin to synchronize their movement, forming a sign or symbol in the air. For a moment, Rust looks puzzled -- or as if he has experienced deja vu. Then, without a word, he moves on, and the detectives continue toward the burnt-out church.
Three years ago, while I was watching that specific scene in that specific episode, it immediately reminded me of something, but I couldn’t place what it was. Watching the scene play out, the setting itself gave the scene a sense of foreboding, while the random hallucination added a thrilling sense of mystery and the fantastic. It reminded me of books I had read as a child -- young adult horror books. Ones with remarkable covers that had frightened and enchanted me as a boy.
But the names escaped me. I finally found relief after a series of Google searches (as one does). The books that one brief scene in True Detective had dredged from my memory were by a young adult author named John Bellairs. And the cover art that stood so vividly in my mind, pen and ink drawings full of shadowy forms and eerie faces, were by the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey.
In his lifetime, from 1938 to 1991, John Bellairs authored 15 young adult horror books. His work is distinguished by three different “series” that focused on a particular teenage boy protagonist: Lewis Barnevalt, Anthony Monday, and Johnny Dixon. In each series of books, the protagonist becomes wrapped in a mystery that involves fighting some force of evil: deceased knights, maniacal wizards, or British occultists bent on destroying the world.
John Bellairs’s most famous young adult novel was his 1973 debut, The House with a Clock in Its Walls. But the Bellairs books I knew best as a child were those in the Johnny Dixon series. In them, Johnny, who lives with his grandparents in 1950s Duston Heights, Mass., because “his mother was dead and his father was flying a jet in the Air Force” (an actual description from The Secret of the Underground Room) finds himself involved in frightening adventures with his friend Professor Roderick Childermass. Professor Childermass is an active professor in his 70s who is cranky, smokes Balkan Sobranie cigarettes (one of the oldest brands of luxury tobacco in the world), an expert on the occult, and loves to bake cakes (with fondant icing) and other complicated desserts with Johnny.
What gives the Johnny Dixon books much of their appeal is the frank way in which matters of the occult are treated by the characters. Professor Childermass is known to say things to Johnny like, “You were right when you said the ghosts of the living sometimes appear to people,” without further explanation. Leaving aside how profound a line like that is when closely analyzed (it is truly something Joyce might have included in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses), the forthright and simplistic acceptance of elements of the fantastic is charming, even to an adult reader. There’s no messing around in theories or justification. The logic is simple: some things are just true and they are also just scary.
“John’s stories regularly feature some sort of horror or and supernatural,” says Craig Seemann, who runs the comprehensive John Bellairs website, Bellairsia. “Examples of someone trying to bring about the end of the world, someone attempting to find a way to extend his natural life by supernaturally stealing the life of someone younger, or someone seeking revenge from beyond the grave are all presented as genuine. That is, these are very real events that are taking place with lasting repercussions and it is up to our heroes to find the courage do the right thing.”
Now, this all might sound like well-trod territory in a post-Harry Potter world, but what set the Bellairs books apart, and perhaps ingrained them so deeply in my memory, were Edward Gorey’s cover illustrations. Before his death in 2000, Gorey had a long and fascinating career as an artist, one that took him from the Art Institute of Chicago, to the Poet’s Theatre at Harvard (working alongside Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and others), to a position at Doubleday in the art department, to printmaking and producing experimental theatre in Cape Cod during the latter part of his life. Gorey’s greatest career success is perhaps his costume design on the 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula, which won him two Tony Awards. However, what he may very well be best known for are his covers for John Bellairs’s novels.
“To me, Bellairs and Gorey are a single, two-headed beast,” Grady Hendrix told me. Hendrix is an author of horror and science fiction novels and one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival. “The covers and the illustrations by Gorey felt adult, not geared for kids, and that made all the difference. Whereas a lot of children’s book illustration at the time was joyfully colored with rounded curves and soft textures, Gorey’s drawings were a funereal black and white, with barbed edges and spiky textures.”
Indeed, Gorey’s illustrations give off a sense of hopelessness and terror. Very often they perfectly match and heighten scenes from the novels. In The Chessmen of Doom, Johnny, Professor Childermass, and Johnny’s trusty sidekick, Fergie, are investigating a mystery on an island in the middle of lake Umbagog in Maine. A storm drives them into a chapel. “The chapel was empty. Rows of varnished pews stretched before the communion rail, and on the altar six tall candles burned. Before the rail three coffins stood on sawhorses.” Inside the chapel, they encounter a “man in a long black cassock...His hands were pale and bony, and his face reminded Johnny of a skull. His red-rimmed eyes burned in deep-set sockets.”
Gorey’s corresponding illustration in the book’s frontispiece shows a man dressed in a long, black robe, with a skull for a head. Behind him, six thin, white, candles are lit, their bases shaded with heavy ink lines. The man faces Johnny, the Professor, and Fergie, each one with a uniform, non-plussed, almost childish look on their faces. Below them sit three identical coffins penned fully in black.
For many readers, it is nearly impossible to separate Bellairs from Gorey. “I used to stare at the Gorey covers and frontispieces, matching them to scenes in the books,” says Leanna Chappell, a 36-year-old librarian and head of youth services at the Swanton Public Library in Ohio. “Gorey does a great job of conveying creepiness without being gratuitous, and the books have a similar feel.”
Seemann draws other parallels that extend beyond the duo’s collaboration in print. “I’ve always found Gorey’s work to be wonderfully disconnected from anything contemporary, call it Victorian or Edwardian or Weirdian,” he says. “This goes hand-in-hand with John’s novels: novels written of a time-period long after the event. John’s books are of another time, but a place strangely familiar.”
However, despite their interwoven legacy in the minds of readers, Bellairs and Gorey never met. A member of The Edward Gorey House Museum in Yarmouth, Mass., went so far as to say that they may never have corresponded.
Andreas Brown who helped Edward Gorey establish the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust (and who was a friend of Gorey for many years) acknowledged this to likely be the case. “I haven’t seen any correspondence between them in the archives. They would send him the manuscript and he would read it and then do a cover that he thought was appropriate for the story,” Brown told me in a phone conversation. “It doesn’t mean there couldn’t be two or three letters in miscellaneous correspondence. But as far as we are aware, they never communicated.”
At 84, Brown has spent a large portion of his time immersed in the life and work of Edward Gorey. They met at the legendary Gotham Book Mart in New York, which Brown bought from Frances Steloff in 1967. After helping Gorey set up his trust, Brown served as something of a financial guardian angel for the artist. And the picture Brown paints of the relationship between Gorey’s illustrations for John Bellairs’s novels is one merely of a professional obligation.
“Gorey was at that time doing jobs that he wasn’t always happy with,” Brown says. “Publishers were putting deadlines on him. But at the same time he needed the money.”
In fact, according to Brown, later in his life, Gorey wanted to disown his cover illustrations for Bellairs. “He called me up one day and said, ‘Let’s get all of the Bellairs work out of the archives.’ He just didn’t think it represented him and what he was trying to do. He saw it as his grunt work.”
The relationship between authors of children’s books and their illustrators is traditionally more of a professional arrangement than close collaboration. Usually, a publisher will keep the author and illustrator as separate as possible in the publication process so as not to throw any complications into production. However, there have been iconic author and illustrator pairings that have broken this unwritten rule, such as Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake and A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard (who illustrated the Winnie-the-Pooh books) among others.
And Gorey’s disconnect from those beloved illustrations would most certainly come as a shock to readers who still cherish John Bellairs novels. “There are not as many anymore,” Leanna Campbell told me based on her experiences at the Swanton Public Library. “But they're still out there, especially fans of Gorey's work.” Indeed, they are still out there, especially on Twitter, where readers still show their appreciation of Bellairs’s with snapshots of pages from the book featuring their (or their kids’) favorite quotes. Or, more likely, they are sharing their favorite Gorey cover.
Even Brown, when asked to explain why people might still have a fondness for the Gorey and Bellairs pairing, was able to find a fond memory. “There was an exhibit of Gorey’s illustrations for the Bellairs books at Gotham Book Mart. I don’t recall what year,” he told me. “We had sketches and preliminary drawings and things like that. A large portion of the people that bought them were young guys from Wall Street. They all read these books when they were in elementary school. The show sold out very quickly.”
Like those young guys from Wall Street, I had read John Bellairs books in elementary school. But the names John Bellairs and Edward Gorey had receded into my own memory until a single scene in True Detective pulled them back. It would be tenuous at best to say that a prestige television show -- one full of more grotesque horror than any Bellairs book or Gorey illustration -- about a fraught partnership reflects in any way on the relationship between the two men. So, I won’t try to draw any conclusions there.
Instead, after re-reading several of the Johnny Dixon books, which I ordered online in a rush of excitement to research this story, the only conclusion I can come to is that John Bellairs’s stories and Edward Gorey’s illustrations still make a perfect match. The moments of horror in Bellairs’s fiction are abrupt and unsettling: a glance towards a window reveals a pale face pressed against the glass, a ritual is performed with a bloody human skull, in the catacombs of chapels our heroes encounter the mummified bodies of monks. And on every cover, there is a Gorey illustration capturing one specific moment of despair exactly as it is described on the page.
Craig Seemann articulated the creative synchronicity between Bellairs and Gorey through an anecdote once told to him by Al Myers, who was a friend of Bellairs at Notre Dame. According to Myers, he and Bellairs were browsing a bookstore and came across The Fatal Lozenge, an illustrated alphabet book by Edward Gorey. According to Seemann, “Myers says that Bellairs was particularly fond of Z, which was illustrated with a Zouave [a class of French Army infantry members in the 19th and 20th centuries] hoisting an impaled baby on a bayonet with an accompanying verse. In short, Bellairs appears to have been an early fan of Gorey’s work. The Fatal Lozenge was published in 1960. It’s odd to realize that in less than 15 years, John would be a published author with Gorey as his illustrator, too.”
So, in many ways it doesn’t matter that Gorey and Bellairs may never have met, or that Gorey saw his illustrations for the books as nothing but a means to an end. Sometimes, for whatever reason, some things in life just fit. And something you see as inconsequential, a job, a relationship, a tossed off song or illustration, can wind up defining your legacy. Some things in life are just true.